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Everytime google changes something it alters the distribution of income on the web. we are all to blame for allowing google to gain near monopoly power.
At first google was insanely great, now its insanely irritating.
I am going to start using ATW and teoma and encourage everyone I know to explore non-google options. If this becomes a trend the web won't be so dependent on google for the distribution of web dollars.
This might encourage google to look at its business ecology. Quite simply it doesnt have one. It doesnt help business' on the web and isn't interested in sharing income. It doesn't publish any rules and changes them on whim. This lack of business ecology is going to seriously hamper its momentum going forward imho.
Are you reading this google? we want some stability and certainty! and to the point we want cooperation.
There hasn't been a proper deepcrawl and update with new data for months. Even if you block googlebot, your site will stay listed with the same SERP anyway-- with no chance of voicing your protest by being delisted. In a cruel twist of fate, Google will not allow you to boycott, and your site will stay listed even if you return an Untitled Document or a 404.
Viva la Revolucion!
Like that's going to happen though...!
Actually MS understands this approach and nurtures it, if it weren't for all those MS certifications floating around, MS would have gone away a long time ago: they understand who decision makers/influencers are.
What would happen if MS were to put up the equivalent of the google webmaster page; "Most of theses so-called certified developers are incompetent and may damage your business", well, my guess is that the developer base would very quickly migrate to linux or amiga (and so would the rest of the world).
Well - IMHO they certainly USE it - and I have to agree they use it well. However, we are all pretty familiar with the MS approach to the world. Ruthless monetisers with no regard for anything else (hey... don't start me off John!).
>> they understand who decision makers/influencers are. <<
That is certainly true and a very good point. I do wonder whether Google actually does. Again, I suspect so. Whether they will be as exploitative as MS who knows - I like to think the best of people, but we will see.
The crux of the matter is that the product counts, not necessarily the marketing efforts and spin. They work for a little while, then the underlying value rears its head once again.
Peter
also you wrote >>Then I think you differ significantly from most businesses. It is VERY hard to plan and build when you can have zero confidence in how things are. Most business strive to build a stable base.<<
Yes we are like other businesses. We like this stable, but the fact is the external environoment cannot be totally controlled by you, though you try, usually by having contingencies and researching for when probelms may occur. To us free SE listings are a nice revenue earner, but we have never ever costed them as definite future earnings, only as part of a group of promotional vehicles including ther promotional methods - one quarter one thing really works well, the others so-so, and one terrible, next quarter it may be the opposite, but added all up we know with a portfolio of promotional expenditure, that will we get a certain return.
Same as the farmer. the sun may shine for 2 years, but then one month will be a flood. We can never control the external environment, only have contingencies and try to predict it, and influence it if we can. You can have stability and the more diverse your promotion, suppiers, products and customers, the more likely that in the end you can have stability, while inididual factors will be very unstable.
Ive said ad nauseum here that free search engine listings are no basis for business. It is something you have only limited contril over, and if you follow the trends over the past 6 or so years, the writing is on the wall, at least for me, that free SE listings will become less and less a part of ad expenditure for most businesses - putting their money into paid ads on other sites, PPC and the like.
Given that reality, I have to manage it. Management is far easier with some stability, albeit tenuous.
The main thrust of the debate is the relationship with Google, which I view as a partnership. Obviously they can't guarantee specific 'positions' for their part of the bargain, but they can guarantee at least some stability if you play by their rules (stability as defined above). I'm basically arguing that delivery of some stability is a moral obligation upon them, in return.
By the way, I'm not suggesting a REALLY long term model for this business (eg: 10 years), because the landscape will be radically different even for the net itself. But even with the peaks and troughs, it should be possible to plot a way forward for perhaps 12-18 months given some stability from Google. I think most people would buy that.
Marketers follow the market.
By now we all know how silly we are to depend on "free" search listings.
For the most part I agree. However, if you are just starting up and don't have money behind you, relying on search engines may be your only choice.
Me, I've only been in the game for a few months and I'm already trying to move away from reliance on Google. But the fact is, Google, or other search engines are likely to be very significant in driving traffic to my site for a long time to come.
For a new company, instability from Google could easily be the last straw and put it out of business. It may not be a bad company, just one in a competitive market.
I think it entirely reasonable to expect fair treatment from any company whether or not its services are (apparently) free. For instance (in the UK) companies get a free listing in the Yellow pages. However, it would be unfair if that organisation simply refused to include a company on a whim.
Kaled.
Indeed. That, I suspect, is where most of us started. Certainly I did.
>> a few months and I'm already trying to move away from reliance on Google <<
Ah well - we part company there. I have no chance at all of moving away, because my competitors have far more $$$ to spend on traditional advertising than me. They'd kill my business through any other medium.
I build MUCH better web sites than they do and MUCH better content, but they have capital. The web (free search) is the only advertising media through which I can beat them. If you know of another, do let me know!
It's not just you. digitalghost got it also. :)
Stability is only good for you if you are at a point where you can't do any better.
Digitalhost, you better keep the money and tell the members they will be getting freshly baked biscuits instead of tee-shirts:)
I'm dead set against stability. If my site was to only move up or down a couple of spots each month, I would still be under 200 referrals a day from the 100 a day that I was getting in September.
Stability like in Tennis ATP ranks. Some players zoom up to #20 or so within a couple of months, becomes more difficult after that. Similarly #1 ranked players do not drop out of top 10 entirely in one day.
I have little respect for sites that are so concentrated on one keyword or keyphrase that they cannot survive a hit on that term for a month or two. The are usually so optimized for "the current algo" that they take a major hit when the algo changes for some reason.
If you had to do that to get to number one, you might have been better off sticking with the nice stable traffic of a robust site (like in that thread the other day) on page 2.
Everyone wants on the front page, and there are very few pages that are so good that there aren't at least 20 other pages on the web that are just as deserving of being on the front page.
Would you be just as happy to be at #36 if that spot was 100% guaranteed? How about it you knew that every site on the first 3 pages had a 5% chane each month of totally disappearing?
What you want is "stability at the top".
tability like in Tennis ATP ranks. Some players zoom up to #20 or so within a couple of months, becomes more difficult after that. Similarly #1 ranked players do not drop out of top 10 entirely in one day.
How many professional tennis players are there? 100? 10,000?
We are dealing with SERPs that have millions of results. That "top 10" might be the equvalent to top 500 on google. Of course you can bring up all the amateur web sites and amateur tennis players, but it just doesn't matter because they are totally unrelated anyway.
Do I? Did I say that? No.... I'm afraid I didn't... whichever way you spin it.
>> if that spot was 100% guaranteed <<
Again, I said nothing of the sort. Maybe it was those voices in your head ;-)
I'll tell you what stability ISN'T (although no doubt you will find a way to argue with even that). It ISN'T being #1 on a term (rightly so because of content and industry standing) and then barely being in the index at all the next time you look.
We are not talking randem placement here. We are talking established sites that searchers would expect to see, and the webmaster would certainly expect to see.
Stability from Google is the variation on a site's placement being reasonable, based upon normal events. If you think what we have seen with Dominic meets anything like that definition, you are in a world of your own.
No - don't counter, because I ain't going to argue on this one. This is a side issue on the posts I made above which I think most people understand the thrust of.
Regarding content, I can get a PR 5 website simply by getting the word count high enough. In their effort to outfox spammers, google has created a spammer's utopia. Obviously there's a bit more to this, but what I know is my sites consistently rank at the top in every search engine except google, where it takes about 10 times the effort and generally revolves around the silly exercise of stuffing the site full of content and linking the hell out of it. Does this make the site better? Not a chance.
We are dealing with SERPs that have millions of results. That "top 10" might be the equvalent to top 500 on google.
Actually "millions of results" is misleading and gives false sense of competition to the webmasters. For example if a web page is optimized for
"kw1 kw2 kw3 kw4"
most people test it out by typing
kw1 kw2 kw3 kw4
which is interpreted by Google as
kw1 OR kw2 OR kw3 OR kw4
Means any page that contains a single instance of any of these four keywords is returned.
Moreover, order is important too and a site containing "kw1 kw2 kw3 kw4" is placed higher than a site containing "kw1 kw3 kw2 kw4", other things being same.
For most competitive 4 (or even 3) keyword combination searches I would guess that competition is not more than 10000 and probably less than 1000. In lesser competitive keyword combinations 200-300 could be the norm for real competition, other millions of pages are there by accident and not by design.
On the other hand top 10 in tennis is out of tens of thousands of active professional and club players. Competition is tougher in tennis than in Google searches and yet rankings are fairly stable in tennis!
